Virgil

The Writer's Almanac - It's the birthday of the Roman poet Virgil, (books by this author) born Publius Vergilius Maro near Mantua, Italy (70 B.C.). His father was a peasant, a farm worker who married the boss's daughter. So the boy, Virgil, was sent off to Milan, Rome, and Naples for his education. He missed the countryside, so he came back to the family farm and wrote poetry.

He lived at a time of civil wars, and his first collection of poems, known as the Eclogues, about farmers and shepherds and the rural landscape, was very popular because it reminded people of a simpler time before things had gotten so bad. At the request of the government, he wrote poems to persuade Romans to go back to the countryside and to work the land again. He wrote four volumes of these poems about agriculture, known as The Georgics, and they offered instruction in farming, animal husbandry, and beekeeping.

The emperor Augustus was so impressed by Virgil's work that he gave Virgil two villas to live in and a stipend to live on for the rest of his days. And so Virgil set out to write an epic poem which he called The Aeneid, which told the story of Aeneas, one of the soldiers in the Trojan War, traveling home from Troy to found a new city that would become Rome.

Virgil worked on it for 11 years. He took a trip to Greece so he could pick up some details for one of the sections of the poem. On the voyage he caught a fever, came back to Italy, and died before the poem was completed.